The new German government surprised NATO allies on Thursday by proposing plans to stimulate defense spending, to reach a goal of five percent of the GDP demanded by US President Donald Trump.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Johann Wadephul, made the promise one day after the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, in office for a little over a week, said that his coalition government intended to have “the strongest conventional army in Europe”.
NATO chief Mark Rutte launched a plan for members to reach the objective of five% by spending 3.5% of GDP on military spending and 1.5% for other security measures such as infrastructure and cyber defense.
Wadephul, speaking at a NATO meeting in Turkey, underlined Rutte’s proposal to reach “the five percent that President Trump demanded” and said that “we follow him there”.
In Berlin, the Minister of Finance Lars Klingbeil struck a more prudent note, saying that “we will spend more on security, but how it will be that we will see in the agreement concluded at the top of NATO” which will take place next month in The Hague.
Roderich Kiesewetter, a former German military officer and a party politician from the Merz CDU, described the announced move as a “paradigm change”, in an interview with the Bild Daily.
He added that “this will not happen overnight, but it must happen”.
The objective seems ambitious, given the disastrous state of the German armed forces which were in the grip of shortages of key weapons systems and are in trouble to recruit new troops.
Germany, with its dark history of the Second World War, has long hesitated to spend great in defense. Funding fell sharply after the Cold War when European countries were on NATO heavy goods vehicles for the United States for security.
Decades of lower military expenditure has reduced the number of battle and thousand -of -thousands of battle and hundreds’ battle reservoirs.
– ‘period shift’ –
In recent years, the German armed forces have laughed at equipment failures when they have deployed in Afghanistan and Mali. These included helicopters who could not fly and rifles that did not shoot straight.
The army, in the hope of increasing the strength of the troops to 203,000 by 2031, did not achieve its additional objective last year by more than 20,000, despite a campaign on social networks.
The army has “too little of everything” – from air defenses and satellite drones and AI – parliamentary commissioner to the armed forces, Eva Hoegl, warned in March.
Trump has long said that NATO partners did not pay their fair share. Germany just struck the objective of the alliance last year to spend two percent of the GDP in defense.
